The Problem

It is very likely that one day you will get an email from an account called system PRIVILEGED, with a subject of System Backups and a body similar to this: There may be more than one file listed as not backed up. This is more likely to occur with a variation of the above message, which informs you that some file(s) was not backed up because (The rest of the mail is the same as above.)

What these mails are telling you is that either an individual file (the first message) or your homedir (the second message) is too big to be included in the nightly incremental backups. They will still be included in the monthly full dumps.

The 20Mb directory limit often confuses people. What happens with the incremental backups is they take a list of every file you modified that day, then start backing them up one by one, counting the bytes, until they reach 20Mb. The total file size, NOT the size of the changes, is counted. This means that if you have one very big file, and you make a tiny change to it, it will get included in your nightly backup and take up most of the 20Mb limit, squeezing out other files that you may have extensively changed. This tends to happen to people who never clean out their old mails. New mail gets added every day so the file gets included in the incremental backups, but most of the file is old and has already been backed up many times - and this old stuff is preventing newer files from being backed up.

The Solution

For the first message, all you need to do is make the file smaller. You can remove or compress it (see Cleaning up Files) if it's a file you don't use often. If the file has to be uncompressed, such as your .incoming-mail file, you will need to make it smaller somehow (for example, saving mails to folders and deleting them from .incoming-mail), or configure buff to ignore the 1048576 byte limit on individual files, or accept that it will not be backed up every night.

To configure buff, you will need a .backup file in the directory where such large files exist, or in your home directory. For example, if you want to ignore the file size of your incoming mail file, in your .backup include: If you want to exclude certain files or directories:

For the second message, you may need to do more work. You cannot configure buff to ignore the 20971520 byte (approx. 20Mb) directory limit, so either you remove/compress files until your homedir is under 20Mb, or you accept that some files will not be backed up every night. You can configure buff to ignore designated files, or ensure designated files are the first to be backed up. This way you can ensure that your 20Mb limit includes the files you want backed up. If you need more than this then you will need to discuss it with CSG.